Book Review – On The Edge of Gone

Book: On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis
Release Date: March 8th 2016
Genre: Sci-Fi
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Goodreads // Otherbound

Synopsis

January 29, 2035. That’s the day the comet is scheduled to hit—the big one.

Denise and her mother and sister, Iris, have been assigned to a temporary shelter outside their hometown of Amsterdam to wait out the blast, but Iris is nowhere to be found, and at the rate Denise’s drug-addicted mother is going, they’ll never reach the shelter in time.

A last-minute meeting leads them to something better than a temporary shelter: a generation ship, scheduled to leave Earth behind to colonize new worlds after the comet hits. But everyone on the ship has been chosen because of their usefulness. Denise is autistic and fears that she’ll never be allowed to stay. Can she obtain a spot before the ship takes flight? What about her mother and sister?

When the future of the human race is at stake, whose lives matter most?

Review

On the Edge of Gone was one of my most anticipated releases of 2016. Having read the author’s other book, Otherbound, I knew this book would be interesting when it comes to diversity. And I have to say that I prefer On the Edge of Gone over Otherbound.

One very specific reason for this are the characters. I really enjoyed reading about these characters, especially Denise who is the main character that we follow. Denise has autism so I was interested to see how the author would write the character. The author herself has autism so I was rather confident that it would be done well. Also the responses from others to her having autism, like how her mom treated her in some instances (negatively), were rather believable.  Denise was very complex as a character and I enjoyed that.

Another thing that I liked was that Denise and her sister are Surinamese. There were little bits and pieces about how people respond to them because of that, but it wasn’t delved into too much. I didn’t necessarily mind that too much as otherwise I feel Denise would have too much around her. You have to pick and choose a little where you put the focus on. I maybe would have liked to have seen or heard more about Suriname or her father.

Next to that there were more little bits of diversity throughout the book that I quite liked to see.

As for the plot, I sometimes felt that was more so in the background to Denise’s development and search, and her relationships with other people. As such the middle was slow. But I did not mind this too much. Seeing everything come together with Denise was interesting enough for me.